Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
how could I become a system administrator?
It's basically "shall issue" to anyone that we've known for any length of time. The only reason it's restricted at all is that there are some irreversible and hard-to-reverse things that you could do, and so it's dangerous to give those powers to random passerby.
Two things that we need to resist are (a) the idea that sysops have more authority than anyone else in editing pages and (b) ALL use of sysop powers "in a fight" about the content of a page.
I wish we had a lot more sysops, so that we could partly demystify the position.
--Jimbo